Monthly Archives: June 2018

Silicon Valley’s tech workers can go to great lengths to appear youthful—from having plastic surgery and hair transplants, to lurking in the parking lots of hip tech companies to see how the young and promising dress, as chronicled a few years ago by the New Republic. While this may seem extreme, there is clearly a bias among many in the tech sector toward the young. Read more>>

For most of us, our ability to see, hear, and move without assistance are but fleeting privileges. And there are many people who, by circumstance of birth or later life events, aren’t able to see, hear, or move parts of their bodies without assistance. The good news is there are many companies out there looking to develop tools, treatments, and solutions for disabled people. Furthermore, investors are committing capital to those technologies. Read more>>

Seed prices are surprisingly complex, but even herbicide and pesticide prices vary depending on a farm’s size and location, and agricultural suppliers tend to bundle products in a way that obscures their true cost. Since its founding, FBN has built a network of more than 6,500 farms to which it offers information, an online store and marketing help—all with the goal of making farmers more profitable. Read more>>

A Crunchbase News analysis of venture funding for the food and beverage category found that startups in the space gobbled up more than $3 billion globally in disclosed investment over the past twelve months. That includes a broad mix of supersize deals, tiny seed rounds, and everything in between. Read more>>

If you aspire to be a successful startup leader, it helps to know how to solve the toughest challenges you’ll face. When I was a graduate student at MIT, professors overloaded me with challenging weekly problem sets. So I figured an MIT professor would be able to solve the problem of answering the 9 toughest challenges facing an entrepreneur. Read more>>

Pulling things from thin air is generally considered a magic trick. But several recent research papers suggest we could soon be extracting valuable resources like water, fuel, and power from the atmosphere. Startup Carbon Engineering published a new technique for turning atmospheric CO2 into fuel last week that is starting to make the approach seem economically viable. Read more>>

A graduate student at Stanford, Kim had been working with an international team of neuroengineers on a crazy project: an artificial nerve that acts like the real thing. Like sensory neurons embedded in our skin, the device—which kind of looks like a bendy Band-Aid—detects touch, processes the information, and sends it off to other nerves. Read more>>

The leadership at Coinbase, Lyft, Checkr and other high-flying startups are grateful that their coach, Khalid Halim, didn’t skip out on a class called Military Science as an undergrad at UCLA: “I started noticing patterns in startups — which I’ve validated with executives and VCs over the years — that how companies scale and break matches military groupings.” Halim pulls at the strings of the phenomenon to articulate what he calls the law of startup physics. Read more>>

Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized the ways we use data to target audiences and generate ideas for content. The future of AI means using technology to create hyper-personalized marketing content. By now, most of us have asked Alexa and Siri to tell us a joke. But it’s entirely possible that in the very near future, we could be asking artificial intelligence (AI) systems to tell us a story, or more importantly, using AI content marketing to tell our audiences a story. Read more>>

For startups and small businesses interesting in raising money online, it can be tough to choose a crowdfunding platform — there are so many out there. And they rank differently depending on whether you’re looking at the size the platform, the total amount of capital it has raised, its overall success rate, or the average amount the platform raises per deal. Read more>>